ESPN: People Aren’t Ditching Cable For Streaming TV

Though some are concerned that Netflix, online streaming, Google TV and other similar services might become the death knell for cable television, a new study conducted by ESPN says that not that many people are getting rid of their paid channels. A survey conducted from the same pool of people who Nielsen uses for their television show viewership ratings shows that a measly 0.28 percent of households have cut the cord on their cable bills the last three months, reports the NY Times.

“We got a little worn out reading headline after headline saying, ‘Cord-cutting, it’s a disaster; young people are abandoning TV.’ For our strategic purposes, we needed to know what was really going on,” VP for integrated media research for ESPN Glenn Enoch said to the Times.

Before you say that the results were biased – after all ESPN is a cable channel – the survey results were confirmed by Nielsen. ESPN also reported that 0.17 percent of people who subscribed to Internet services upgraded to add cable plans to their households. Overall, the cable companies are still losing customers but the percentage is so small it’s not much to be concerned about. Data from the research firm SNL Kagan from earlier this year echoed ESPN’s study. It showed that 119,000 customers dropped their cable or satellite subscriptions in the third quarter of this year out of 100 million subscriptions nationwide. Although Hollywood Reporter reported that people are consistently ending their service, SVP for Planning, Policy and Analysis at Nielsen Pat McDonough said that most people are opting to change cable providers than get rid of them completely. As for sports cable channels, which can be hard to find streaming online, Enoch said there was “zero cord-cutting” among customers.